In today's multifaceted society, there are a number of industries (e.g. healthcare) that can be characterized as having a particularly fragmented workforce—in healthcare from physicians to nurses to practice administrators—that are extremely busy in their day to day activities. Day to day work for individuals in today's industries can be highly irregular and unpredictable, and with so many different parts working in isolation there are limited opportunities for people to be exposed to one another. Further, with few networks supporting these people or groups in reaching out and connecting with each other, it's easy for them to become isolated. All of this makes it very difficult for industry professionals to get in touch with who they want when they need to, to stay in touch with colleagues and co-workers within and/or between different industries, and to coordinate productive interactions with each other.
Social and professional networking is valuable to business professionals and healthcare professionals of all types. When people become members of social and professional online networks, they need to connect with other members in order to share information with, interact with, and network through those members. In cases where people are connecting to business professionals, business relationships are important and need to be entered into with care. Each relationship is different, each relationship has a level of trust, and people do not want to connect online with each of their professional contacts in the same way. Ultimately, it's not a one size fits all world when it comes to connecting online and the representation electronically (i.e. online) of the mixture of real world business and professional relationships is problematic using today's electronic relationship models.
Accordingly, in the current one size fits all world, a system is needed that enables community members to connect with their business connections in a way that represents their multifaceted life with the plurality of other members in the community (both known and unknown to the community member) because the members do not want to share the same information, communicate and interact in the same way, nor enable people to network through them in the same way, in view of real-world relationships. An example of this is that not everyone is “best” friends with every other person they have met in their real-world life. There are varying degrees of friendship/acquaintance in the real-world and there is a need to represent this in the online/electronic forum, amongst other possible types of relationships between people.